


Tangibility

by leporidae



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Grief/Mourning, Injury Recovery, M/M, Mentioned Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, Touching, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25538911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leporidae/pseuds/leporidae
Summary: The childhood they’d once shared seems like a distant dream, when the two of them chased each other around Fhirdiad Castle with their graceless, stubby legs and ruddied cheeks, galloping through the halls until exhaustion overtook them and they collapsed together in a fit of laughter. That fleeting happiness had become just another haunted memory for both of them, and this conversation could easily share the same fate if Dimitri is not careful. When it comes to Felix, he never knows how to be carefulenough.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	Tangibility

**Author's Note:**

> My piece for [Project Sworn](https://twitter.com/ProjectSworn) that I finished back in December.
> 
> Some (almost) tender angst.

Rain cascades from the sky after the battle at Gronder Field, each droplet carrying the sorrow of the Goddess herself, weeping for blood spilled and lives lost. Though their army had achieved relative victory, there is no atmosphere of triumph at the monastery. Instead the tired soldiers huddle indoors, exhausted from the fight and their aching wounds exacerbated by the storm, and speak in hushed voices of the future of their crusade against the Empire.

Dimitri weeps too, for Rodrigue, a man he’d held so dear throughout his life; a man whose death shreds the last vestiges of his cherished youth. His chest feels as though it is splintering under his armor, fragile under the weight of Rodrigue’s words.

_Live for what you believe in._

But Dimitri is not the Goddess, and there is a limit to how much one grieving mortal can cry. His sadness does not have the strength to wash away villages and raze crops, and the thunder of the heavens continues to rumble overhead even after his own tears have ceased.

In a daze Dimitri takes shelter in the infirmary, staggering inside on leaden legs. He allows Manuela to treat him as she sees fit, her scoldings falling on deaf ears as he stares unfocused at his hands folded in his lap. The persistent ache of his wound is nothing compared to the dull anguish that has crashed down upon him.

Each death bows his shoulders further with its weight, and Dimitri has borne witness to uncountable deaths. Yet now more than ever the Kingdom counts on him to straighten up and stand tall. They look to Dimitri to represent them, their beacon of hope for the future — never mind the blood he spilled and the souls he banished into the afterlife with his rage and vengeance — and he will of course play that role for his people. Anything less would be disrespectful to the memory of his father and Glenn — and Rodrigue, now.

_The dead won’t acknowledge your loyalty. They don’t care._

Felix’s words had never reached him before, but now that Rodrigue is gone they echo in his mind like footsteps through an empty chamber, trailing behind him with stubborn persistence. _Felix was always right about that,_ Dimitri corrects himself sternly. _Refusing to fulfill my duties now is more disrespectful to those still alive, placing their hopes in me._

Felix, the brother and son of two men who had died for Dimitri, is one of those people.

Dimitri’s hands have migrated from his lap, fingers clenched around the bedsheets, and he uncurls them slowly, watching the tense white fade from his knuckles.

The door to the infirmary slowly creaks open. Dimitri notices the sound without being truly aware of it, listening only to the drumming of rain outside and the thrum of his own pulse in his skull.

“What did you think you were doing, standing outside in the rain like that? You looked like something a cat coughed up, waterlogged and pathetic. Is that any way for the Kingdom’s heir to be conducting himself?”

Dazed, Dimitri looks up to face him. His eyes focus and unfocus; first he sees Glenn, dead and sprawled before him with lips parted in silent despair; then Rodrigue, crumpled to the ground in a heap, glinting blade protruding from a wound blossoming red; and last Felix, standing before him with hands on his waist and lips jutting out in a judgmental pout. Surely this is another illusion manifested by his guilt, and once he blinks Felix too will vanish.

He blinks.

“Felix,” Dimitri croaks, the word fractured like a bone. “You’re here.”

“Glad to know that one eye of yours still functions. How comforting. Did you not hear a word I just said?” Felix groans, striding across the room to sit on the foot of Dimitri’s bed — next to him, _sort of_ next to him, but there nonetheless. The frame creaks with the added weight, the sound pushing through the surreal haze of whatever’s happening, of Felix being here. “Fine. If you’re just going to stare at me with your mouth gaping open like a stupid animal, I’m clearly wasting my time here.”

“I’m sorry,” Dimitri murmurs. “Ah, that is to say — I am all right. I dried myself quite thoroughly.”

The uttered apology, though reflexive, is a mistake; Dimitri watches Felix’s countenance darken, his jaw clenched through closed lips. “Right. Since you _dried yourself,_ there’s clearly nothing for me to worry about.”

_Worry?_ Felix is _worried_ about him. Felix, whose entire family is dead because of him. Felix, who has watched him tear apart enemies like a wild animal. “I have faced worse weather over the past five years,” Dimitri manages. “I doubt a little bit of rain will cause me to fall ill.” There’s no right answer when it comes to Felix, of course, just answers that are slightly less wrong than others. Dimitri hopes this is one of them.

“Then you should have returned to us sooner,” Felix snaps, “instead of wandering around in the rain like a reanimated corpse.”

Felix speaks not of today’s battle but of the past five years, and his words are barbed with the hurt of that abandonment. Dimitri says nothing. He knows Felix is right, as usual. The ache between his shoulder blades, a reminder of the attempted assassination he very much deserved, begins to throb again amidst the silence, and he strains to avoid clenching his jaw from the pain.

The childhood they’d once shared seems like a distant dream, when the two of them chased each other around Fhirdiad Castle with their graceless, stubby legs and ruddied cheeks, galloping through the halls until exhaustion overtook them and they collapsed together in a fit of laughter. That fleeting happiness had become just another haunted memory for both of them, and this conversation could easily share the same fate if Dimitri is not careful. When it comes to Felix, he never knows how to be careful _enough._

“What’s wrong with you?” Felix’s voice, softer than before, floats strangely into Dimitri’s consciousness.

“Ah — sorry?”

“You’re obviously in pain,” he scoffs. “You can hardly even engage me properly. I’m wasting my time here.”

_You’re the one who should be in pain,_ Dimitri thinks, scanning Felix’s face for any sign something had changed since Rodrigue’s death. Instead he finds the same surly scowl as ever, the consistently Felix-like expression that has comforted him throughout his life. “I was told by Manuela that I may be sore for quite some time. There is a limit to what healing can manage, after all. Nothing to be concerned about.” He swallows. “And you, Felix, how are you —”

“Uninjured,” Felix cuts in. “Unlike you I always watch my back. I have no desire to perish at the hand of a little girl throwing a tantrum.”

“Of course,” Dimitri says just to placate him. “You’re very alert, Felix. It’s admirable.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Ah.” Dimitri coughs. “But I wasn’t referring to your physical state, but rather —”

A harsh bark of laughter interrupts him. “My emotional state? Is that what you were about to say?” For but a moment Felix looks unnervingly disheveled, his sardonic smirk twitching as though on the verge of snapping off his face — and then Dimitri blinks and the vision is gone, vanished like the illusions which plague him. “Whether my father is dead or alive changes nothing. I didn’t listen to the self-important ramblings of that man before, and I certainly won’t be doing so now.”

_Changes nothing?_ When his own father had died before his eyes, it was as if the ground itself had split below Dimitri’s feet to swallow him whole as he scrabbled frantically to remain on the surface. Even now the twist of despair in his gut sickens him when he remembers it.

And yet Felix — Felix is unshakable. Now he’d lost everyone too, but his words are still sharp and his scorn as fiery as ever. Dimitri finds himself warmed in the presence of its blaze. Unconsciously Dimitri shifts his body closer to Felix’s if only to bask in that familiar heat a while longer; their shoulders brush and Felix scowls. “Shouldn’t you be lying down? You will be a completely ineffectual leader if you continue to needlessly exhaust yourself.”

“You’re worried about me.” It’s not a question — it’s a realization, spoken with a tinge of wonder.

Felix flushes, deep red blotching across his face, inelegant as a petulant child on the verge of a tantrum. “Dimitri,” Felix hisses, strained. “Did you forget the attempt on your life already? You are the one who should be worried. About yourself.”

“I am in no immediate danger at the moment, Felix,” he says, amused. “As I have said.” Hearing his name spoken from Felix’s lips — no _Your Highness,_ no _Your Majesty_ — makes Dimitri feel a bit giddy. “I have — I have your father to thank, of course,” he adds, the words thick and leaden on his tongue, “that the wound I sustained was not more severe.”

He expects a sharp retort from Felix, but there’s nothing, just the silence that festers between them. Dimitri chances a quick look at Felix, but his features are draped in shadow. Even in death the relationship between Rodrigue and Felix remains complicated at best, but Dimitri can’t imagine that Felix is truly as unaffected as he appears. For whom, then, is he putting on a brave face now?

He wants to ask, and he knows what answer he wants to hear.

“My father was foolish,” Felix says, and then adds in a murmur, “so you better make what he did count.”

Dimitri’s eyes flutter shut. “Of course,” he whispers, and for once it is not the desire to please the dead that drives him, but an almost desperate, sudden craving for approval and acceptance from the very alive man in front of him. There’s so much he wants to apologize for all at once: that bloody, feral grin he’d allowed Felix to witness; the nihilistic path down which he had careened with no thought for those still counting on him; the fact that he’d stolen Felix’s father’s dying breaths in his own arms.

How can he be a king who speaks honestly to his people if his tongue turns to stone in the face of someone who he cares about so deeply, who knows him better than perhaps anyone else? Whenever Dimitri is with Felix his very essence is instantly laid bare before those sharp eyes of his, every flaw and every mistake palpable between them. It petrifies him.

And then —

Felix touches him.

In those five years of isolation, Dimitri’s only human contact had been his own hands pressed desperately against his bleeding wounds. None of it felt real; even when their professor had taken his hand to carefully guide his body out of the rain, his mind had been somewhere else entirely.

Felix _touches_ him.

His hand alights on Dimitri’s back gingerly, fingers trailing between his shoulder blades over the fabric of his bedclothes, mixing the ache of his wound with a pleasant tingling. Carefully, so as not to startle him, Dimitri sucks in a breath. _Delicate_ is the last word Dimitri would ever use to describe him, and yet — Felix moves as though searching for something, and Dimitri doesn’t know what he wants, but he wants Felix to find it, whatever he’s looking for, and to savor it, and linger there.

Dimitri shivers.

The reaction elicits a hiss of protest from Felix, who retracts his hand with a jolt. “Felix?” Dimitri mumbles. That touch had contained something Dimitri has never felt before. Not from anyone — and _certainly_ not from Felix. When he looks up, timidly, to meet his gaze, he finds Felix staunchly turned away from him.

“Clearly, if _that_ was enough to cause you pain —” Felix’s voice breaks, and he coughs hastily — “then you should be getting rest rather than moping.”

“It wasn’t painful at all.”

Felix turns towards him then, and his face is a bit too red, his brow a bit too furrowed. His bottom lip trembles as though he’s about to burst into tears. That would be absurd. _All_ of this is absurd, almost wondrous.

Dimitri laughs.

In a flash Felix stands from the foot of the bed like the sound has stung him, every muscle tensed and his hands balled into fists. Dimitri stares at those hands, wishing they would unfurl, that those fingers that had danced across his skin would extend towards him again. Instead Felix swivels and stomps to the exit, spluttering out one last barbed _“Dimitri”_ before exiting in a huff.

When Felix slams the door, Dimitri can see his hands shaking.

His own hands, folded in his lap, have steadied.


End file.
